Ford Motor Co. demonstrated its Robotic Transit Tuesday, allowing reporters to take a spin in the big van. The robot is not anything like the Johnny Cab I remembered from the first “Total Recall” movie. It was more like the machine used in "Ocean’s 11." It was devoid of personality and even a head. It was a series of rods that acted like feet for the brake and accelerator, a metallic hand that put the vehicle in drive and a system of gears that spun the steering wheel.
While working efficiently to move the van around a small track, it would jerk the wheel to the programed location and then jerk it back to keep going straight. There was no nuance to this robot’s skills, just precision and a series of loud metal clicks.
And unlike autonomous cars, which operate themselves, this particular machine was operated by a human 43 miles away at Ford’s proving grounds in Romeo, Mich. This was really more of a drone Transit than a robot one. The operator could also drive seven other vehicles outfitted with the same sensors, cameras and GPS equipment at the same time if he or she wanted to. See, Ford is replacing drivers with robots. (Though those drivers will now perform other tasks and no one lost a job in the transition to some robot drivers.)
Really, the people drivers might want to show some gratitude toward their servo- and actuator-equipped replacements. The robots are used for Ford’s durability testing and never get bumped up or bruised during testing. Some of Ford’s testing is so severe, human bodies would suffer severe damage. Robots do not.One test run, known as Silver Creek, in Romeo, Mich., is used to break vehicles over and over again. It’s a vicious concrete run built to simulate a rocky river bed. Drivers are only allowed to drive on it twice during an eight-hour shift. Robot drivers, however, are unfazed.

While the controls appear rather crude on the vehicle, engineers said that they were created so production models could be tested. It might be possible to control some things by bypassing the physical controls such as the steering wheel or accelerator, but other controls need the physical touch to operate, such as the gear shifter, which would require them to reprogram the vehicle. Ford wants the testing to be done to unaltered production vehicles, which is why this system was adopted.While the ride certainly lacks that human touch, the test results provide nearly an endless stream of data for engineers to find ways to build better vehicles and build them faster.For that, someone should shake their hand, if only they had one.

That is how Skynet starts. First off, an app to order cars to look for parking lot, now this. Keep going like this and everything we created in order to make easy our life, would become in a terrible nightmare.